Not Your Parent’s Sketchbook

The Class

Last week was the second summer course at the Yale Center for British Art, Not Your Parent’s Sketchbook, a class for children and teens. We used the iPad as a starting point to create work based on art that we saw as we explored the museum collection. Thank you to all the support and assistance of Jaime, Arianna, and Berclee and to Sarah for bringing in the artists, Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman.

The Apps

We used the app Brushes Redux (for drawing and painting) and the Stop Motion app to make some of our creations come to life. Students explored a variety of drawing, painting and music apps on the iPads. One particular favorite during free time was the Magic Piano App. If you used a different app on the BAC iPads that I do not mention here, please email me its description and I will track it down for you.

We drew from life the first day, an apple. We learned about layers and brushes and the cool play-back feature that animates your drawing. We visited the Hockney paintings on the 3rd floor and watched a short video about his process.

Specimen Sculptures

We visited Katherine Morling‘s Butterfly Box, and some specimens of Articles in Common Use, which made us curious what we would include in such a modern specimen box and whether or not our collection would be as puzzling to the people who created the box from the era that was on display. We made white specimen sculptures with model-magic and used black marker to draw. This was just the starting point, as students made the sculptures come to life by adding color, and then by making stop motion animations of their sculpture.

We made Stop Motion Videos

Arianna, our in-house stop-motion expert, cut together this video which showcases many of the stop motion videos the students created with us. You can view it in our Google Drive collection here:

Stop Motion Inspiration

Cyanotype Selfies

On the last day, we were visited by artists Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman whose work we saw on the 2nd floor. It was such a treat to meet the artists in person whose work we had just seen. They spoke about the choices they made in their process and we showed them the cyanotype selfies the students made in the style of their work. To make the selfies, we learned how to download botanical drawings from the YCBA database of artworks. This is a wonderful resource and there are high-resolution images of much of the collection, some of which are even marked for public domain use.

If you were a student for the week and you have a question about a particular work that we saw, an app that we used, or artwork that you created which is not in the shared folder, please email me and describe the piece to the best of your ability and the docents and I will try to track down the information for you.

I feel like we just scratched the surface of what is possible to do in digital drawing, painting, collage, and animation and hope that the students download art and apps and continue to explore and create over the summer and return to the YCAB to visit the artworks again in the future.